Battlefield 3 Beta: Caspian Border Performance and Screenshots

Battlefield 3 is all the rage (but when RAGE comes out, maybe it will be) for PC gamers right now as you can tell from our variousarticleson the subject. They have been very well received but as is usually the case, our readers wanted more. We are still working on our planned system guide but we needed some more data (currently being gathered) and I wanted to pass on some results from the Caspian Border map of the beta.

If you are looking for it today, don't bother - EA removed it. And even when it was online since the 27th it has been password locked. Luckily for us we were able to "find" the password online and jump in to do some quick benchmarking though not as much as we wanted thanks to the removal of the map. All I was able to grab was performance on the ASUS MARS II dual GTX 580 card and the GeForce GTX 580 reference card.

What is interesting is that because that map was for 64 players (rather than the 32 players of the Operation Metro map) and that it included a MUCH larger open space, we were worried that it would require a lot more GPU horsepower or memory than the map everyone is playing on today. While we can't say for 100% certainty because we haven't tested as many cards, it looks like there is only a minimal impact on performance for the client:

So you can see from those results that the Caspian Border map didn't vary much from the performance on the Operation Metro map with those two graphics cards. I am still curious if cards with 1GB of memory might see some more noticeable changes but until the map goes live again, I won't be able to check.

Wow I'm running this on high because I don't think I can change it but I don't think i can do better on a gtx 460 1gb. It looks like the jump from high to ultra seems to be quite significant or maybe it's just me.